President Barack Obama speaks about Le Chambon
Yom Hashoah/Holocaust Remembrance Day
United States Capitol, April 23, 2009 (excerpt)

But while we are here today to bear witness to the human capacity to
destroy, we are also here to pay tribute to the human impulse to save. In
the moral accounting of the Holocaust, as we reckon with numbers like 6
million, as we recall the horror of numbers etched into arms, we also factor
in numbers like these: 7,200 -- the number of Danish Jews ferried to safety,
many of whom later returned home to find the neighbors who rescued them had
also faithfully tended their homes and businesses and belongings while they
were gone.

We remember the number five -- the five righteous men and women who join us
today from Poland. We are awed by your acts of courage and conscience. And
your presence today compels each of us to ask ourselves whether we would
have done what you did. We can only hope that the answer is yes.

We also remember the number 5,000 -- the number of Jews rescued by the
villagers of [the area of] Le Chambon, France -- one life saved for each of [its] 5,000
residents [of the area]. Not a single Jew who came there was turned away, or turned in.
But it was not until decades later that the villagers spoke of what they had
done -- and even then, only reluctantly. The author of a book on the rescue
found that those he interviewed were baffled by his interest. "How could you
call us 'good'?" they said. "We were doing what had to be done."

That is the question of the righteous -- those who would do extraordinary
good at extraordinary risk not for affirmation or acclaim or to advance
their own interests, but because it is what must be done. They remind us
that no one is born a savior or a murderer -- these are choices we each have
the power to make. They teach us that no one can make us into bystanders
without our consent, and that we are never truly alone -- that if we have
the courage to heed that "still, small voice" within us, we can form a
minyan for righteousness that can span a village, even a nation.

Their legacy is our inheritance. And the question is, how do we honor and
preserve it? How do we ensure that "never again" isn't an empty slogan, or
merely an aspiration, but also a call to action?

I believe we start by doing what we are doing today -- by bearing witness,
by fighting the silence that is evil's greatest co-conspirator.

In
1940-44, in the area of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, some 5,000
Jews were sheltered from the Nazis by 5,000 Christians, as recounted
in Pierre Sauvage's 1989-2017 feature documentary Weapons
of the Spirit.

With
regard to the Holocaust, many Americans believe that we didn’t
know--and couldn’t have done anything even if we had known.
Meet Peter Bergson, who led a controversial American effort to fight
the Holocaust. This documentary short provides his unique and
challenging testimony, assembled by Pierre Sauvage from mostly
never-before seen footage.

In
1940-41, in Marseille, France, a New York
intellectual ran the most successful private American rescue operation
of World War II, as will be recounted in Pierre Sauvage's upcoming documentary And Crown Thy Good.

Long article on Le Chambon, A Haven From Hitler,
in England's widely-read Sunday Times Magazine, June 4, 2006

Rev. Waitstill
Sharp and Martha Sharp, husband and wife, joined Varian Fry in
June 2006 as American Righteous Among the Nations. The Sharps'
ties to Le Chambon are significant. After visiting there during
the summer of 1940, Martha Sharp wrote that "the spirit" among
Protestants in Le Chambon and in Nîmes "can bring about the regeneration
of France, if it can be sustained." It was she who escorted six of
Le Chambon pastor Edouard Theis' daughters to the U.S. at that time.
(As it happens, Mildred Theis, the Ohio-born wife of the pastor, was
perhaps the first American to receive, along with her husband, the
honors from Israel's Yad Vashem, although she had given up her American
citizenship by then.)

Virginia Hall, American heroine of the French
Resistance, who worked in the area of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and is
the subject of a biography by Judith Pearson,
Wolves
at the Door, was honored in
the U.S.: Story
of an anti-Nazi Spy.

Left, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.
with farmhouse in foreground that in 2003-2008 could have become
the
Chambon Museum.Certer and right, local headquarters
till summer 2005 of Chambon Foundation in the heart of the village,
where allied tanks rumbled through in September 1944.